  Produced by Al Haines. [image] NEVA. LIGHT-FINGERED BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS AUTHOR OF "THE SECOND GENERATION," ETC. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY COPYRIGHT, 1906, 1907, BY Published, September, 1907 CONTENTS CHAPTER I.— LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY I A MATRIMONIAL MISTAKE Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it was cool, and even murmurously musical. In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around her. Her expression, also, was somber—with the soberness of the ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad. She seemed to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone—the absence of heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out. There was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her face and figure. Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her back, of her waist, of her legs. Her hair was abundant, but no one would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely was it plaited and bound to her head. Her eyes were of that long narrow kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and rebuking passions tempestuous. But this woman had somehow contrived to reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest of her exterior. She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet beautiful she was not. It was as if nature had molded her for love and life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her the vital breath. A close observer might have wondered whether this exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an intense, insurgent heart and mind. But close observers are few, and such a secret—if secret she had—would pass unsuspected of mere shallow curiosity. Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from the ground, on which it had been steadily bent. Across her face drifted a slight smile—cold, or was it merely shy? It revealed the even edge of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion is clear and fine—and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from recent illness or much and harassing worry. The smile was an acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's edge. "How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest. "How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile had given her face. Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or from embarrassment, she gave him her hand. They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials and fraternity symbols. She took advantage of his gaze out over the lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable. He was a big, powerful-looking man—built on the large plan, within as well as without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead. At first glance he seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience, of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have come with many less than forty years. He looked significant, successful, the man who is much and shall be more. He was dressed more fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs, except in two or three of our largest cities. In contrast with his vivid, aggressive personality—or, was it simply because of shy, supersensitive shrinking in his presence?—the young woman now seemed colorless and even bleak. After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said, "This is very mysterious, Neva—this sending for me to meet you—secretly." "I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you—at the house," replied she hesitatingly. His air of surprise was not quite sincere. "Why not?" he inquired. "There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes me. If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him." His tone suggested that he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of the baseness of forgetting it. "It was eighteen months yesterday," said she, "since you were—at the house." He frowned at what he evidently regarded as a disagreeable and therefore tactless reminder. "Really? Time races for those who have something to do besides watch the clock." Then, ashamed of his irritation, "I suppose it's impossible, in an uneventful place like this, to appreciate how the current of a city like Chicago sweeps a man along and won't release him. There's so much to think about, one has no time for anything." "Except the things that are important to one," replied she. "Don't misunderstand, please. I'm only stating a fact—not reproaching you—not at all." "So, your father has turned against me." "He has said nothing. But his expression, when I happened to speak of you the other day, told me it would be better for you not to come to the house—at least, until we had had a talk." "Well, Neva, I don't feel I have any reason to reproach myself. I'm not the sort of man who stands about on the tail of his wife's dress or sits round the house in slippers. I'm trying to make a career, and that means work." "Chicago is only six hours from Battle Field," she said with curiously quiet persistence. "When I got the position in Chicago," he reminded her with some asperity, "I asked you to go with me. You refused." "Did you wish me to go?" "Did you wish to go?" She was silent. "You know you did not," he went on. "We had been married nearly six years, and you cared no more about me—" He paused to seek a comparison. "Than you cared for me," she suggested. Then, with a little more energy and color, "I repeat, Horace, I'm not reproaching you. All I want is that you be frank. I asked you to come here to-day that we might talk over our situation honestly. How can we be honest with each other if you begin by pretending that business is your reason for staying away?" He studied her unreadable, impassive face. In all the years of their married life she had never shown such energy or interest, except about her everlasting painting, which she was always mussing with, shut away from everybody; and never had she been so communicative. But it was too late, far too late, for any sign of personality, however alluringly suggestive of mystery unexplored, to rouse him to interest in her. He was looking at her merely because he wished to discover what she was just now beating toward. "In the fall," he said, "I'm going to New York to live. Of course, that will mean even fewer chances of my coming—here—coming home." At the word "home," which she had avoided using, a smile—her secret smile—flitted into her face, instantly died away again. He colored. "I heard you were going to New York," said she. "I saw it in the newspapers." "I suppose you will not wish to—to leave your father," he resumed cautiously, as if treading dangerous ground. "Do you wish me to go?" He did not answer. A prolonged silence which she broke: "You see, Horace, I was right. We mustn't any longer refuse to look our situation squarely in the face." His heart leaped. When he got her letter with its mysterious, urgent summons, a hope had sprung within him; but he had quickly dismissed it as a mere offspring of his longing for freedom—had there ever been an instance of a woman's releasing a man who was on his way up? But now, he began to hope again. "Ever since the baby was born—dead," she went on, face and voice calm, but fingers fiercely interlocked under a fold of her dress where he could not see, "I've been thinking we ought not to let our mistake grow into a tragedy." "Our mistake?" "Our marriage." He waited until he could conceal his astonishment before he said, "You, too, feel it was a mistake?" "I feared so, when we were marrying," she replied. "I knew it, when I saw how hard you ere trying to do your 'duty' as a husband—oh, yes, I saw. And, when the baby and the suffering failed to bring us together, only showed how far apart we were, I realized there wasn't any hope. You would have told me, would have asked for your freedom—yes, I saw that, too—if it hadn't been for the feeling you had about father—and, perhaps also—" She paused, then went bravely on, "—because you were ashamed of having married me for other reasons than love. Don't deny it, please. To-day, we can speak the truth to each other without bitterness." "I shan't deny," replied he. "I saw that your father, who had done everything for me, had his heart set on the marriage. And I'll even admit I was dazzled by the fact that yours was one of the first and richest families in the State—I, who was obscure and poor. It wasn't difficult for me to deceive myself into thinking my awe of you was the feeling a man ought to have for the woman he marries." He seemed to have forgotten she was there. "I had worked hard, too hard, at college," he went on. "I was exhausted—without courage. The obstacles to my getting where I was determined to go staggered me. To marry you seemed to promise a path level and straight to success." "I understand," she said. Her voice startled him back to complete consciousness of her presence. "There was more excuse for you than for me." "That's it!" he cried. "What puzzles me, what I've often asked myself is, 'Why did she marry me?'" "Not for the reason you think," evaded she. "What is that?" he asked, his tone not wholly easy. "It wasn't because I thought you were going to have a distinguished career." This penetration disconcerted him, surprised him. And he might have gone on to suspect he would do well to revise his estimate of her, formed in the first months of their married life and never since even questioned, had not her next remark started a fresh train of thought. "So," she said, with her faint smile, "you see you've had no ground for the fear that, no matter how plainly you might show me you wished to be free, I'd hold on to you." "A woman might have other reasons than mere sordidness for not freeing a man," replied he, on the defensive. "She might think she had." "That is cynical," said he, once more puzzled. "The truth often is—as we both well know," replied she. Then, abruptly, but with no surface trace of effort: "You wish to be free. Well, you are free." "What do you mean, Neva?" he demanded, ashamed of the exultation that surged up in him, and trying to conceal it. "Just what I say," was her quiet answer. After a pause, he asked with gentle consideration of strong for weak that made her wince, "Neva, have you consulted with anyone—with your father or brother?" "I haven't spoken to them about it. Why should I? Are not our relations a matter between ourselves alone? Who else could understand? Who could advise?" "What you propose is a very grave matter." Again her secret smile, this time a gleam of irony in it. "You do not wish to be free?" His expression showed how deeply he instantly became alarmed. She smiled openly. "Don't pretend to yourself that you are concerned about my interests," she said; "frankness to-day—please." "I'm afraid you don't realize what you are doing," he felt compelled to insist. "And that is honest." "You don't understand me. You never did. You never could, so long as I am your wife. That's the way it is in marriage—if people begin wrong, as we did. But, at least, believe me when I say I've thought it all out—in these years of long, long days and weeks and months when I've had no business to distract me." "You are right," he said. "We have never been of the slightest use to each other. We are utterly out of sympathy—like strangers." "Worse," she replied. "Strangers may come together, but not the husband and wife whose interest in each other has been killed." She gazed long out over the lake toward the mist-veiled Wabash range before adding, almost under her breath, "Or never was born." "I have a naturally expansive temperament," he went on, as if in her train of thought. "I need friendship, affection. You are by nature reserved and cold." She smiled enigmatically. "I doubt if you know me well enough to judge." "At least, you've been cold and reserved with me—always, from the very beginning." "It would be a strange sort of woman, don't you think, who would not be chilled by a man who regarded everyone as a mere rung in his ladder—first for the hand, then for the foot? Oh, I'm not criticising. I understand and accept many things I was once foolishly sensitive about. I see your point of view. You feel you must get rid of whatever interferes with your development. And you are right. We must be true to ourselves. Worn-out clothes, worn-out friends, worn-out ties of every kind—all must go to the rag bag—relentlessly." He did not like it that she said these things so placidly and without the least bitterness. He admitted they were true; but her wisdom jarred upon him as "unwomanly," as further proof of the essential coldness of her nature; he would have accepted as natural and proper the most unreasonable and most intemperate reproaches and denunciations. He hardened his heart and returned to the main question. "Then you really wish to be free?" He liked to utter that last word, to drink in the clarion sound of it. "That has been settled," she replied. "We are free." "But there are many details——" "For the lawyers. We need not discuss them. Besides, they are few and simple. I give you your freedom; I receive mine—and that is all. I shall take my own name. And we can both begin again." He was looking at her now; for the first time in their acquaintance he was beginning to wonder whether he had not been mistaken in assigning her to that background of neutral-colored masses against which the few with positive personalities play the drama of life. As he sat silent, confused, she still further amazed him by rising and extending her hand. "Good-by," she said. "You'll take the four-fifty train back to Chicago?" It seemed to him they were not parting as should two who had been so long and, in a sense, so intimately, each in the other's life and thought. Yet, what was there to be said or done? He rose, hesitated, awkwardly touched her insistent hand, reluctantly released it. "Good-by," he stammered. He had an uncomfortable sense of being dismissed—and who likes summarily to be dismissed, even by one of whose company he is least glad? Suddenly, upon a wave of color the beauty that nature had all but given her, swept, triumphant and glorious, into her face, into her figure. It was as startling, as vivid, as dazzling as the fair, far-stretching landscape the lightning flash conjures upon the black curtain of night. While he was staring in dazed amazement, the apparition vanished with the wave of emotion that had brought it into view. Before he could decide whether he had seen or had only imagined, she was gone, was making her way up the path alone. A sudden melancholy shadowed him—the melancholy of the closed chapter, of the thing that has been and shall not be again, forever. But the exhilarating fact of freedom soon dissipated this thin shadow. With shoulders erect and firm, and confident gait he strode toward the station, his mind gone ahead of him to Chicago, to New York, to his future, his career, his conquest of power. An hour after his train left Battle Field, Neva Carlin was to Horace Armstrong simply a memory, a filed document to be left undisturbed under its mantle of dust. II A FEAST AND A FIASCO "There'll be about six hundred of us," Fosdick had said. "Do your best, and send in the bill." And the best it certainly was, even for New York with its profuse ideas as to dispensing the rivers of other people's money that flood in upon it from the whole country. The big banquet hall was walled with flowers; there were great towering palms rising from among the tables and so close together that their leaves intermingled in a roof. Each table was an attempt at a work of art; the table of honor was strewn and festooned with orchids at a dollar and a half apiece; there was music, of course, and it the costliest; there were souvenirs—they alone absorbed upward of ten thousand dollars. As for the dinner itself, the markets of the East and the South and of the Pacific Coast had been searched; the fish had come from France; the fruit from English hothouses; four kinds of wine, but those who preferred it could have champagne straight through. The cigars cost a dollar apiece, the boutonniÈres another dollar, the cigarettes were as expensive as are the cigars of many men who are particular as to their tobacco. Lucullus may have spent more on some of his banquets, but he could have got no such results. In fact, it was a "seventy-five a plate" dinner, though Fosdick was not boasting it, as he would have liked; he was mindful of the recent exposures of the prodigality of managers of corporations with the investments of "the widow and the orphan and the thrifty poor." Fosdick, presiding, with Shotwell on his right and Armstrong on his left, swelled with pride in his own generosity and taste as he gazed round. True, the O.A.D. was to pay the bill; true, he had known nothing about the arrangements for the banquet until he came to preside at it. But was he not the enchanter who evoked it all? He hadn't a doubt that his was the glory, all the glory—just as, when he bought for a large sum a picture with a famous name to it, he showed himself to be greater than the painter. He prided himself upon his good taste—did he not select the man who selected the costly things for him; did he not sign the checks? But most of all he prided himself on his big heart. He loved to give—to his children, to his friends, to servants—not high wages indeed, for that would have been bad business, but tips and presents which made a dazzling showing and flooded his heart with the warm milk of human kindness, whereas a small increase of wages would be insignificant, without pleasurable sensation, and a permanent drain. Of all the men who devote their lives to what some people call finance—and others call reaping where another has sown—he was the most generous. "A great, big, beating human heart," was what you heard about Fosdick everywhere. "A hard, wily fighter in finance, but a man full of red blood, for all that." Having surveyed the magic scene his necromancy and his generosity had created, he shifted his glance patronizingly to the man at his right—the man for whom he had done this generous act, the retiring president of the O.A.D., to whom this dinner was a testimonial. As Fosdick looked at Shotwell, his face darkened. "The damned old ingrate," he muttered. "He doesn't appreciate what I've done for him." And there was no denying it. The old man was looking a sickly, forlorn seventy-five, at least, though he was only sixty-five, only two years older than Fosdick. He was humped down in a sort of stupor, his big flat chin on his crushed shirt bosom, his feeble, age-mottled hand fumbling with his napkin, with his wineglass, with the knives, forks, and spoons. "The boys are giving you a great send off," said Fosdick. As Shotwell knew who alone was responsible for the "magnificent and touching testimonial," Fosdick risked nothing in this modesty. Shotwell, startled, wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Yes, yes," he said; "it's very nice." Nice! And if Fosdick had chosen he could have had Shotwell flung down and out in disgrace from the exalted presidency of the O.A.D., instead of retiring him thus gloriously. Nice! Fosdick almost wished he had—almost. He would have quite wished it, if retiring Shotwell in disgrace would not have injured the great company, so absolutely dependent upon popular confidence. Nice! Fosdick turned away in disgust. He remembered how, when he had closed his trap upon Shotwell—a superb stroke of business, that!—not a soul had suspected until the jaws snapped and the O.A.D. was his—he remembered how Shotwell had met his demand for immediate resignation or immediate disgrace, with shrieks of hate and cursing. "I suppose he can't get over it," reflected Fosdick. "Men blind themselves completely to the truth where vanity and self-interest are concerned. He probably still hates me, and can't see that I was foolishly generous with him. Where's there another man in the financial district who'd have allowed him a pension of half his salary for life?" But such thoughts as these in this hour for expansion and good will marred his enjoyment. Fosdick turned to the man at his left, to young Armstrong, whom he was generously lifting to the lofty seat from which he had so forbearingly ejected the man at his right. Armstrong—a huge, big fellow with one of those large heads which show unmistakably that they are of the rare kind of large head that holds a large brain—was as abstracted as Shotwell. The food, the wine before him, were untouched. He was staring into his plate, with now and then a pull at his cropped, fair mustache or a passing of his large, ruddy, well-shaped hand over his fine brow. "What's the matter, Horace?" said Fosdick; "chewing over the speech?" Armstrong straightened himself with a smile that gave his face instantly the look of frankness and of high, dauntless spirit. "No, I've got that down—and mighty short it is," said he; "the fewer words I say now, the fewer there'll be to rise up and mock me, if I fail." "Fail! Pooh! Nonsense! Cheer up!" cried Fosdick. "It's a big job for a young fellow, but you're bound to win. You've got me behind you." Armstrong looked uncomfortable rather than relieved. "They've elected me president," said he, and his quiet tone had the energy of an inflexible will. "I intend to be president. No one can save me if I haven't it in me to win out." Fosdick frowned, and pursed his lips until his harsh gray mustache bristled. "Symptoms of swollen head already," was his irritated inward comment. "He's been in the job forty-eight hours, and he's ready to forget who made him. But I'll soon remind him that I could put him where I got him—and further down, damn him!" "Some one is signaling you from the box straight ahead," said Armstrong. "I think it's your daughter." As the young woman was plainly visible and as Armstrong knew her well, this caution of statement could not have been quite sincere. But Fosdick did not note it; he was bowing and smiling at the occupants of that most conspicuous box. At the table of honor to the right and left of him were the directors of the O.A.D., the most representative of the leading citizens of New York; they owned, so it was said, one fifteenth and directly controlled about one half of the entire wealth of the country; not a blade was harvested, not a wheel was turned, not a pound of freight was lifted from Maine to the Pacific but that they directly or indirectly got a "rake off"—or, if you prefer, a commission for graciously permitting the work to be done. In the horseshoe of boxes, overlooking the banquet, were the families of these high mightinesses, the wives and daughters and sons who gave the mightiness outward and visible expression in gorgeous display and in painstaking reproduction of the faded old aristocracies of birth beyond the Atlantic. Fosdick had insisted on this demonstration because the banquet was to be not only a testimonial to Shotwell, but also a formal installation of himself and his daughter and son in the high society of the plutocracy. Fosdick had long had power downtown; but he had lacked respectability. Not that his reputation was not good; on the contrary, it was spotless—as honest as generous, as honorable as honest. Respectability, however, has nothing to do with honesty, whether reputed or real. It is a robe, an entitlement, a badge; it comes from associating with the respectable, uptown as well as down. Fosdick, grasping this fact, after twenty years' residence in New York in ignorance of it, had forthwith resolved to be respectable, to change the dubious social status of his family into a structure as firm and as imposing as his fortune. His business associates had imagined themselves free, uptown at least, from his vast and ever vaster power; at one stroke he showed them the fatuous futility of their social coldness, of their carefully drawn line between doing business with him and being socially intimate with him, made it amusingly apparent that their condescensions to his daughter and son in the matter of occasional invitations were as flimsily based as were their elaborate pretenses of superior birth and breeding. He invited them to make a social function of this business dinner; he made each recipient of an invitation personally feel that it was wise to accept, dangerous to refuse. The hope of making money and the dread of losing it have ever been the two all-powerful considerations in an aristocracy of any kind. Respectability and fashion "accepted." So, Fosdick, looking across that resplendent scene, at the radiant faces of his daughter and son, felt the light and the warmth driving away the shadows of Shotwell's ingratitude and Armstrong's lack of deference. But just as he was expanding to the full girth of his big heart, he chilled and shrunk again. There, beside his daughter, sat old Shotwell's wife. She was as cold as so much marble; the diamonds on her great white shoulders and bosom seemed to give off a chill from their light. She was there, it is true; but like a dethroned queen in the triumphal procession of an upstart conqueror. She was a rebuke, a damper, a spoiler of the feast. She never had cared for old Shotwell; she had married him because he was the best available catch and could give her everything she wanted, everything she could conceive a woman's wanting. She had tolerated him as one of the disagreeable but necessary incidents of the journey of life. But Shotwell's downfall was hers, was their children's. It meant a lower rank in the social hierarchy; it meant that she and hers must bow before this "nobody from nowhere" and his children. She sat there, beside Amy, in front of Hugo, the embodiment of icy hate. "This damn dinner is entirely too long," muttered Fosdick, though he did not directly connect his dissatisfaction with the cold stare from Shotwell's wife. But Mrs. Shotwell was not interfering with the enjoyment of Amy and Hugo. If Fosdick had planned with an inquisitor's cunning to put her to the most exquisite torture, he could not have been more successful. From his box she had the best possible view of the whole scene; and, while Shotwell had told her only the smallest part of the truth about his "resignation," she had read the newspaper reports of the investigation of the O.A.D. which had preceded his downfall, and, though that investigation had changed from an attack on him to an exoneration, after he yielded to Fosdick, she had guessed enough of the truth to know that this "testimonial" to him was in fact a testimonial to Fosdick. Hugo and Amy, the children of a rich man and unmarried, had long been popular with all the women who had unmarried sons and daughters; this evening they roused enthusiasm. Everybody who hoped to make, or feared to lose, money was impressed by their charms. Amy, who was pretty, was declared beautiful; Hugo, who looked as if he had brains, though in fact he had not, was pronounced a marvel of serious intellectuality. The young men flocked round Amy; Hugo's tour of the boxes was an ovation. To an observant outsider, looking beneath surfaces to realities, the scene would have been ludicrous and pitiful; to those taking part, it seemed elegant, kindly, charming. Mrs. Shotwell was almost at the viewpoint of the outsider—not the philosopher, but he who stands hungry and thirsty in the cold and glowers through the window at the revelers and denounces them for their selfish gluttony. And by the way of chagrin and envy she reached the philosopher's conclusion. "How coarse and low!" she thought. "New York gets more vulgar every year." Amy, accustomed all her life to have anything and everything she wanted, had been dissatisfied about the family's social position and eager to improve it; but the instant she realized they were at last "in the push," securely there, she began to lose interest; after an hour of the new adulation, she had enough, was looking impatiently round for something else to want and to strive for. Not so Hugo. Society had seemed a serious matter to him from his earliest days at college, when he began to try to get into the fashionable fraternities, and failed. He had been invited wherever any marriageable girls were on exhibition; but he had noted, and had taken it quickly to heart, that he was not often invited when such offerings were not being made. He had gone heavily into a flirtation with a young married woman, as dull as himself. It was in vain; she had invited him, but her friends had not, unless she was to be there to take care of him. He had attributed this in part to his father, in part to his married sister—his father, who made occasional slips in grammar and was boisterous and dictatorial in conversation; his sister, whose husband kept a big retail furniture store and "looks the counter-jumper that he is," Hugo often said to Amy in their daily discussions of their social woes. Now, all this worriment was over; Hugo, touring the boxes, felt he had reached the summit of ambition. And it seemed to him he had himself brought it about—his diplomatic assiduity in cultivating "the right people," the steady, if gradual, permeation of his physical and mental charms. Amy sent a note down to Armstrong, asking him to come to the box a moment. As he entered, Hugo was just leaving on another excursion for further whiffs of the incense that was making him visibly as drunk, if in a slightly different way, as the younger and obscurer members of the staff of the O.A.D. downstairs. At sight of Armstrong he put out his hand graciously and said: "Ah—Horace—howdy?" in a tone that made it difficult for Armstrong to refrain from laughing in his face. "All right, Hugo," said he. Hugo frowned. For him to address one of his father's employees by his first name was natural and proper and a mark of distinguished favor; for one of those employees to retort in kind was a gross impertinence. He did not see just how to show his indignation, just how to set the impudent employee back in his place. He put the problem aside for further thought, and brushed haughtily by Armstrong, who, however, had already forgotten him. "Just let Mr. Armstrong sit there, won't you?" said Amy to the young man in the seat immediately behind hers. The young man flushed; she had cut him off in the middle of a sentence which was in the middle of the climax of what he thought a most amusing story. He gave place to Armstrong, hating him, since hatred of an heiress was not to be thought of. "What is it you want so particularly to see me about?" Armstrong said to her. She smiled with radiant coquetry. "Nothing at all," she replied. "I put that in the note simply to make sure you'd come." Armstrong laughed. "You're a spoiled one," said he. And he got up, nodded friendlily to her, bowed to her Arctic chaperon and departed, she so astonished that she could think of nothing to say to detain him. Her first impulse was rage—that she should be treated thus! she whom everybody treated with consideration! Then, her vanity, readiest and most tactful of courtiers, suggested that he had done it to pique her, to make himself more attractive in her eyes. That mollified her, soon had her in good humor again. Yes, he was as much part of her court as the others; only, being shrewder, he pursued a different method. "And he's got a right to hold himself dear," she said to herself, as she watched him making his way to his seat at the table of honor. Certainly he did look as if he belonged at or near the head of the head table. Soon her father was standing, was rapping for order. Handsome and distinguished, with his keen face and tall lean figure, his iron-gray hair and mustache, he spoke out like one who has something to say and will be heard: "Gentlemen and ladies!" he began. "We are gathered here to-night to do honor to one of the men of our time and country. His name is a household word." (Applause.) "For forty years he has made comfortable an ever increasing number of deathbeds, has stood between the orphan and the pangs of want, has given happy old age to countless thousands." (Applause. Cries of "Good! Good!") "Ladies and gentlemen, we honor ourselves in honoring this noble character. Speaking for the directors, of whom I am one of the oldest—in point of service"—(Laughter. Applause.)—"speaking for the directors, I say, in all sincerity, it is with the profoundest regret that we permit him to partially sever his official connection with the great institution he founded and has been so largely instrumental in building up to its present magnificent position. We would fain have him stay on where his name is a guarantee of honesty, security and success." (Cheers.) "But he has insisted that he must transfer the great burden to younger shoulders. He has earned the right to repose, ladies and gentlemen. We cannot deny him what he has earned. But he leaves us his spirit." (Wild applause.) "Wherever the O.A.D. is known—and where is it not known?" (Cheers and loud rattling of metal upon glass and china.)—"there his name is written high as an inspiration to the young. He has been faithful; he has been honest; he has been diligent. By these virtues he has triumphed." (Cheers.) "His triumph, ladies and gentlemen, is an inspiration to us all." (Cheers. Cries of "Whoope-ee" from several drunken men at the far tables.) "Let us rise, gentlemen, and drink to our honored, our honorable chief!" The banqueters sprang to their feet, lifting their glasses high. Old Shotwell, his face like wax, rose feebly, stared into vacancy, passed one tremulous hand over the big, flat, weak chin, sunk into his chair again. Some one shouted, "Three cheers for Shotwell!" Floor and boxes stood and cheered, with much waving of napkins and handkerchiefs and clinking of glasses. It was a thrilling scene, the exuberant homage of affairs to virtue. "I see, ladies and gentlemen, that my poor words have been in the direction of your thoughts," continued Fosdick. "And now devolves upon me the pleasant duty of——" Here a beflowered hand truck, bearing a large rosewood chest, was wheeled in front of the table of honor. The attendants threw back the lid and disclosed a wonderful service of solid gold plate. This apparition of the god in visible, tangible form caused hysterical excitement—cheers, shouts, frantic cranings and wavings from floor and gallery. "—The pleasant duty of presenting this slight token of appreciation from our staff to our retiring president," ended Fosdick in a tremendous voice and with a vast, magnanimous sweep of the arms. Old Shotwell, dazed, lifted his chin from his shirt bosom, stared stupidly at the chest, rose at a prod from his neighbor, bowed, and sat down again. Fosdick seated himself, nudged him under the table, whispered hoarsely under cover of his mustache, "Get up. Get up! Here's the time for your speech." The old man fumbled in his breast pocket, drew out a manuscript, rose uncertainly. As he got on his feet, the manuscript dropped to the floor. Armstrong saw, moved around between Shotwell and his neighbor, picked up the manuscript, opened it, laid it on the table at Shotwell's hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," quavered Shotwell, in a weak voice and with an ashen face, "I thank you. I—I—thank you." The diners rose again. "Three cheers for the old chief!" was the cry, and out they rang. Tears were in Shotwell's eyes; tears were rolling down Fosdick's cheeks; some of the drunken were sobbing. As they sang, "For he's a jolly good fellow," Fosdick's great voice leading and his arm linked in Shotwell's, Armstrong happened to glance down at the manuscript. The opening sentence caught his eye—"Fellow builders of the Mutual Association Against Old Age and Death, I come here to expose to you the infamous conspiracy of which I have been the victim." Before Armstrong could stop himself, he had been fascinated into reading the second sentence: "I purpose to expose to you, without sparing myself, how Josiah Fosdick has seized the O.A.D. to gamble with its assets, using his unscrupulous henchman, Horace Armstrong, as a blind." Armstrong, white as his shirt, folded the manuscript and held it in the grip a man gives that which is between him and destruction. The singing finished, all sat down again, Shotwell with the rest. Had his mind given way, or his will? Armstrong could not tell; certain it was, however, that he had abandoned the intention of changing the banquet into about the most sensational tragedy that had ever shaken and torn the business world. Armstrong put the manuscript in his pocket. "I'll mail it to him," he said to himself. But now Josiah was up again, was calling for a "few words from my eminent young friend, whom the directors of the O.A.D., in the wise discharge of the trust imposed upon them by three quarters of a million policy holders, have elected to the presidency. His shoulders are young, gentlemen, but"—here he laid his hand affectionately upon Armstrong—"as you can see for yourselves, they are broad and strong." He beamed benevolently down upon Armstrong's thick, fair hair. "Young man, we want to hear your pledge for your stewardship." Horace Armstrong, unnerved by the narrowly averted catastrophe, drew several deep breaths before he found voice. He glanced along first one line, then the other, of the eminent and most respectable directors, these men of much and dubious wealth which yet somehow made them the uttermost reverse of dubious, made them the bulwarks of character and law and property—of all they had trodden under foot to achieve "success." Then he gazed out upon the men who were to take orders from him henceforth, the superintendents, agents, officials of the O.A.D. "My friends," said he, "we have charge of a great institution. With God's help we will make it greater, the greatest. It has been one of the mainstays of the American home, the American family. It shall remain so, if I have your coÖperation and support." And he abruptly resumed his seat. There were cheers, but not loud or hearty. His manner had been nervous, his voice uncertain, unconvincing. But for his presence—that big frame, those powerful features—he would have made a distinctly bad impression. As he sat, conscious of failure but content because he had got through coherently, old Shotwell began fumbling and muttering, "My speech! Where's my speech! I've lost it. Somebody might find it. If the newspapers should get it——" But the dinner was over. The boxes were emptying, the intoxicated were being helped out by their friends, the directors were looking uneasily at Fosdick for permission to join their departing families. Fosdick took Shotwell firmly by the arm and escorted him, still mumbling, to the carriage entrance, there turning him over to Mrs. Shotwell. "He's very precious to us all, madam," said Fosdick, indifferent to her almost sneering coldness, and giving the old man a patronizing clap on the shoulder. "Take good care of him." To himself he added, "I'll warrant she will, with that pension his for his lifetime only." And he went home, to sleep the sleep of a good man at the end of a good day. |
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